Until recently the class were not cleared into Temple Meads according to the sectional appendix. A special notice was issued for this working with some changes in route clearance for the class in the area.
Have the class been into Temple Meads before?

The information I have implies it was a "test run" maybe ahead of some work at Barton Hill.

Are there that many people who travel from Bristol to Birmingham at that time in the morning?

Click to expand...

Doesn’t really matter. What it actually achieves is an extra service between Bristol and Gloucester, running over an hour before the regular weekday GWR service starts up. If it would be running ECS from Bristol area anyway, making it a passenger service provides a useful whole network benefit.

The people who are already able to travel from Bristol to Birmingham that early can still use the main XC Glasgow service, 1S35, which overtakes the Stansted because it doesn’t call at Gloucester...